How do you get yourself to learn a new keyboard format after years of typing with qwerty?

I've looked at some of these alternate options and i can see how they'd be efficient, but like, i can't see myself unlearning qwerty after decades of typing every day.

Heheh

As usual, the keyboard you choose will depend on your use case and personal preference of feel.

I’ve used a Ferris Sweep and a Corne. The Ferris sweep had too little keys in my opinion. I didn’t like bouncing between multiple layers to get to symbols and numbers and function keys. I found that i was getting lost in between layers often and the mental overhead was just uncomfortable to me. Some people swear by 34 keys. Just not for me.

I liked the Corne much better. The extra column meant I could bind those to common modifier keys like ctrl, alt, and super/windows, as well as have a dedicated escape, tab, and del. The extra thumbs meant I could have shift, backspace, space, and two layer keys.

As I was using the Corne more I decided that I didn’t like having two layer keys since I was accidentally pressing the incorrect layer key for what I wanted. My brain had this urge to only want to use one layer key to access symbols and numbers. I also couldn’t get a comfortable position for the arrow keys around the symbols and numbers. I had just ever so slightly too few keys.

So then I tried out this one, the Atreus. It’s similar to the Corne but features a couple more keys, which allows for more common symbols to placed on the default layer. This gave me room for arrow keys on the second layer as well as the numbers and other symbols. Now, I only need one layer key to access most of what I need for my development work.

My only issue currently with this keyboard is that, at least how I have mine currently setup, the ; key is on the bottom most row where the down arrow in the picture is. I find that my muscle memory isn’t quite there and I often hit adjacent keys when trying to hit the semicolon. But I imagine that will smooth out once I use this more. I also notice that my right wrist isn’t all that happy. It wasn’t happy before typing on a standard keyboard. This Atreus isn’t fully split so I can’t angle it exactly how I want it for ergonomics.

That being said I’ve been typing on the Atreus for about three weeks now and I can say that so far this is my favorite layout. It has just the right amount of keys for me. I’m going to experiment with another split keyboard that similar number of keys on each side, but fully split. I haven’t decided yet what that will be.